


The Art of Walking Away

by broken_stone



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 04:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10608954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/broken_stone/pseuds/broken_stone
Summary: Three years later, it's the end of the worlds and she sees Lee again.





	

**Author's Note:**

> previously posted on livejournal, a billion years ago.

The first time Kara and Lee have sex, he vomits after. He turns away from the toilet and rinses his mouth out with water while she sits on the floor and rocks back and forth. She doesn’t cry. She just rocks slowly backwards and forward, until he leaves. After he closes the door she climbs into the shower and tries to scrub him off of her skin. When she can’t erase the feel of his hands on her and inside her she rips the curtain off the shower and screams, sinking to her knees in the stall and sobbing. When Zak gets home two hours later, she smiles and he smiles and he kisses her and she is screaming inside but he can’t hear her and she has to quell her own impulse to vomit.  
   
Three years later, after the end of the worlds she sees Lee again. He smiles and she smiles, and both are genuine and if the end of the world was good for anything it was for erasing that awful thing that had sat itself down between them all those years before. She makes the mistake of mentioning Zak and he’s obviously still bitter and they lose all the progress that had been held in those identical grins. “He was my brother,” he said. “What was he to me, nothing?” And she saw the answer in his eyes, just a flash and it took out her knees. Yes, nothing was what he was to you. You didn’t deserve him and he would have walked away. Good thing he died before he saw who you really are and she thought, Well I didn’t frak myself, Lee and told him to frak the hell off then. He left, and she was told he’d been killed and she knew she’d ruined both of the Adama sons.  
   
She prays to the gods and has to fight not to gag at the hypocrisy. Asking the gods to watch over the soul of a man who had never believed in them, whom she had slept with and whose brother she had killed; a man who meant nothing to her other than everything and she set her idols aside to go work on her viper.  
   
She hears his voice and she climbs out from under her viper. He’s smiling that damned half- smile of his, smug and alive. She has trouble talking to him, and he knows, and ‘It’s good to be wrong.’ His grin once again wipes clean their slate, and they manage to keep the peace for more than a day this time. It’s on Colonial Day, when she sleeps with Baltar and cries his name and she thinks, here we are again. She grabs her dress and walks out of Baltar’s rooms, makes her way back to the pilot’s quarters. Everyone has passed out by that point and Kara takes her things into the shower to clean up. She leans above the toilet for a moment, seized with dry heaves that have nothing to do with how much she drank and she knows she just lost Lee again.  
   
She manages to avoid his face in the breakroom, but he must have seen her discomfort on her because he finds her in the hanger bay and she wouldn’t have hit him, really, except he had to bring up the night they slept together and she had to stop him. “Oh, it’s just like old times, Kara. Just like that time you couldn’t keep your hands off the Major from wherever-” and they both know she didn’t go home with the Major that night. So she slams her fist into his face and they don’t talk about it. She walks away, jumps away and if she doesn’t come back, fine. She doesn’t have anything to come back to anyway.  
   
But she does come back and he walks forward, smiling and he kisses her and its weird because it doesn’t invoke anything from that night, but is new and fresh and she missed him. There’s anger over Boomer and Helo, and she’s scared for the Old Man but it’s a normal anger; a normal anger and not the mutually destructive system of self loathing and bile they usually spew. He finds her in the locker room, tells her he loves her and while his words should feel false or hypocritical, they don’t. The words are real, and they manage for a moment to come close to acknowledging the reason they always have to push so hard. They don’t hate each other. Not at all.  
   
Or he doesn’t, until he sees her missing dogtag, and thinks How could I have lost her? She was gone for a week and he says it, but it comes out like an accusation and she asks ‘If I’m a whore, Lee, why do you fraking care so much?’ and they hate harder and more deeply than ever before. Sam comes to the Galactica and Kara gets a perverse pleasure from rubbing him in Lee’s face, but his presence actually seems to calm a lot of emotion between them. Kara was unavailable to Lee, and she didn’t plan on making the same mistakes with Sam that she did with Zak.  
   
That was the plan, at least, until New Caprica. She wakes up the morning after Baltar’s ground- breaking ceremony and knows that if she walks away this time, there will never be another chance. She will finally be ending the cycle.  All of this will happen again but Kara has decided not to let it. She walks away. He lets her.


End file.
